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Dessert

Boston Cream Pie

A custard pie with a buttered flour and sugar crust, flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boston Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the eggs. Add sugar and flour. Mix well.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Add butter and salt.

  5. Stir until thickened.

  6. Flavor with lemon or vanilla extract.

Make and bake the crust

  1. Beat the eggs separately for the crust.

  2. Mix the crust eggs with sugar, salt, flour, baking powder, and milk or water.

  3. Divide the batter in half.

  4. Bake in pie tins until golden.

Assemble and serve

  1. Once cooled, split each crust in half.

  2. Spread half the cream between the crust halves.

  3. Serve cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the cream as they cook and give the custard body and richness.
Flour
Thickens the cream and gives the crust structure as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream and adds moisture to the crust batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and crust and helps the crust brown.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the cream.
Baking powder
Lifts the crust batter so it rises and bakes up light.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Adding the eggs to very hot milk without constant stirring can cook them into lumps. Keep stirring as the mixture thickens so the eggs set smoothly and the cream stays silky.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar, flour, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, flour, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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